The ‘War on Terror’ Was Always About Hegemony

This essay appeared in the Nov. 13, 2025 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

Say this about Donald Trump: he has an uncanny ability to unmask the American empire in ways few likely thought possible.

Recall the extraordinary exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly during a 2017 interview, when Trump blared, “You think our country’s so innocent?” in response to the then-Fox News host referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer.”

By equating American-instigated horrors with Putin, Trump unknowingly rebranded American Exceptionalism as American Delusion. Of course, Trump was—and continues to be—less interested in the implications of American hegemony and instead hyper-focused on expanding the country’s imperial reach. All he was doing was telling the truth (we know, difficult for him) about the realities of operating as an empire—likely paralyzing with outrage the “they hate us for our freedoms” sycophants who lied the United States into undeclared forever wars. As for Trump, well, from bombing Iran one day to launching a war with our closest neighbors to the south, conquest—the dominant throughline throughout American history—motivates Trump as much as it did his predecessors, including his modern counterparts. Obviously, accidentally falling into a truth-bomb now and again doesn’t make him a good guy.

Speaking of modern counterparts (most notably the recently deceased), Trump this week—again, unknowingly—took a blowtorch to the entire narrative around the War on Terror and effectively revealed the whole, blood-soaked, societies-splintering (including our own) campaign to be complete and utter bullshit.

For years, going back to the very outset of the Cheney-Bush Middle East conquest, we were told that everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan—seemingly the whole lot of the region—were the “worst of the worst.” Irredeemable, even.

In 2001, when President Bush abruptly changed U.S. policy toward interrogations and handed over control to the Department of Defense, he made clear that anyone the White House had “reason to believe” was affiliated with al Qaeda would be subject to detention.

Ambiguity was the policy and, as a result, hundreds of people were rounded up and locked away at Guantanamo Bay, the notorious prison that was reopened in 2002. The far majority of those marooned there were picked up on bounties that the United States paid out in the thousands for “suspicious” persons.

“We’d ended up with a bunch of guys warlords had turned in for a bounty with no evidence they had any value,” Mark Fallon, a former DoD official told News Beat several years ago. “We called them dirt farmers—lots and lots of dirt farmers.”

That didn’t stop the Bush administration from peddling the lie that everyone held at GITMO were hardened terrorists.

“It’s important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo,” Bush said in September 2006. “These aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield—we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo.”

(Sure, sure, sure.)

And the elite class bought it, just as they did the WMD lies—from the media to Bush and Cheney’s enablers in Washington.

A week after Dick Cheney’s death, Trump welcomed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al Qaeda operative, to the White House as the administration continues its efforts to legitimize al-Sharaa’s reign following the shocking overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime late last year.

Al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, reportedly joined an al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He was later captured and detained at Camp Bucca in 2005, where he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the eventual leader of the Islamic State (IS).

Al-Sharaa, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was reportedly ordered to fight in Syria in 2011, where he established al-Nusra Front (designated a terrorist organization by the State Department), which he would later rebrand as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (also designated a terrorist organization). Al-Sharaa broke away from IS and pledged allegiance to al Qaeda in 2013.

Remarkably, up until last year, there was a $10 million bounty on his head, which the first Trump administration issued in 2017. In the accompanying letter released with the high-priced bounty, the State Department claimed that under his leadership, the now-defunct al-Nusra Front “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians. In April 2015, ANF reportedly kidnapped and later released approximately 300 Kurdish civilians from a checkpoint in Syria. In June 2015, ANF claimed responsibility for the massacre of 20 residents” in Idlib province, Syria.

Since leading the overthrow of Assad’s government, al-Sharaa has been recognized by leading Western governments and, earlier this year, became the first Syrian president to attend the United Nations General Assembly in decades. As for its relationship with the United States, al-Sharaa met with Trump for the first time in May and the sides have been working on sanctions relief since.

Perhaps more astonishing, al-Sharaa sat down for an in-studio interview with Fox News this week—the same network responsible for endless fear-mongering about Islam and Middle East nations for the last two decades-plus.

Of course, none of this is really about al-Sharaa. It’s about the deep-seated antipathy U.S. officials and the media have created since 2001, drumming up Red Scare levels of hate toward Muslims in the country and abroad. We had the NYPD running surveillance ops of Muslim Americans in the five boroughs and outside its jurisdiction, we had so-called Countering Violent Extremism programs in which regular citizens were effectively deputized to spy on their own neighbors, we had multiple Congressional hearings related to the supposed “radicalization” of Muslim Americans, and on and on.

As the War on Terror increasingly became out of sight amid the drone war and IS was slowly diminished, the years-long Islamophobia campaign was relegated to the shadows, but never went away. Testament to that has been the resurgence of racist, anti-Muslim hysteria in recent weeks and months—not directed at former combatants-turned-allies like al-Sharaa, but a Brown politician whose political project is built around affordability and whose criticism of Israel turned the New York City mayoral race on its head.

Among the reactions to NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s rise: “Launch the nuke” (from a sitting member of Congress), “Taxis will be replaced by camels…Women will be forced to cover themselves head to toe…NYPD will be replaced with religious police…All hot dog stands will be replaced with goat meat stands” (a former MLB pitcher), “Wake up New York!” with a video of the 9/11 attacks (another sitting member of Congress), among other ludicrous and racist comments.

On the subject of al-Sharaa? Crickets.

It’s all very revealing. It was never about a religion, extremism, or hatred for our freedoms (mind-numbingly dumb). The Empire now has a hold in Syria—which its client state (Israel) has launched hundreds of strikes against since last December.

It’s always been about hegemony. Trump has made that plainly obvious. He should do the same with his regime change op in Venezuela.

Image Source

• Donald Trump, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.